


Fresh Start

by BansheeLydia



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Derek Hale & Laura Hale Are Twins, F/F, Hale Family Feels, Hale Twins, M/M, Post Hale Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 17:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12258966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BansheeLydia/pseuds/BansheeLydia
Summary: Derek hasn't spoken to Laura since the night of the fire.





	Fresh Start

**Author's Note:**

> this is set in a canon divergence/AU where Peter knew about Malia and she's always lived with the Hales, Peter was Talia's twin and a good person, and the only person to die in the fire, and Laura and Kira met in New York.

“Oh, that’s my twin.”

Laura blames it on too much mulled wine and not enough sleep that the words slip out before she can really think about what she’s saying, and after a loud yawn and a few seconds for her brain to catch up, she thinks _shit_.

Next to her, Kira looks up suddenly, fingertip still hovering above the photo she’d been pointing to. It’s an old one, faded and a little wrinkled from back when Laura’s mom kept it in her wallet. She’s seven years old in the picture, with messy hair and skinned knees and a gap in her teeth as she grins as wide as possible, holding back her wolf eyes to avoid camera flare just the way her mom taught her.

They’ve spent the whole evening flicking through this photo album – an old family one, mostly full of pictures of Laura’s mom and Uncle Peter when they were younger – so by now, Laura is easily recognizable, but of course Kira doesn’t know who the skinny boy with too big ears and bright red mud boots with his arm around Laura and a big cheesy grin is.

“You have a twin?” Kira asks softly.

Laura tugs their shared shawl tighter around them and shrugs slightly, looking down at the photograph. “Yeah. His name is Derek.”

Kira stares at her for a long moment. “You have a twin. Called Derek.” Her voice is quiet and hurt and Laura’s heart sinks.

“Yeah,” Laura reaches out, resting her hand on top of Kira’s. “I’m sorry. I know it’s…a surprise.”

There’s a long beat of silence as Kira looks down at their hands. “It’s definitely that. I don’t…get it. We’ve been together for three years and I’m only just getting to meet your family in two weeks. And now you tell me you have a _twin_ that you’ve never mentioned.”

Laura closes her eyes. Kira’s right, of course she is. She should have told her before. But the whole Derek thing is messy and just thinking about him always makes her heart hurt, so until now it’s just been easier to not mention it. 

She knows it must be weird for Kira. For her, family is everything. Laura met her parents a month into their relationship and since they live in the city too, she and Kira visit them at least once a fortnight. She knows Kira finds it strange that she hasn’t met Laura’s family, that she doesn’t talk about them much. 

But for Laura…family is a sensitive subject. She’s close to her mom and Cora and Malia, but seeing them, Malia especially, brings back a lot of grief. It’s why she chose to stay in New York after college instead of moving back home. But now there’s a ring hidden at the back of Laura’s sock drawer, she wants Kira to meet her family, because hopefully if her answer is yes, they’ll be Kira’s family too.

“We don’t really talk,” Laura explains quietly.

Kira pauses, then flips her hand to press their palms together, fingers linking with Laura’s. Her gaze is softer when she looks at Laura, patient and understanding, and Laura thanks her lucky stars that this amazing woman chose to love her.

“How come?”

Laura fiddles with the edge of the photo album. “The fire,” she says and Kira scoots even closer, the warmth of her body familiar and reassuring. “After, Derek was…I mean, we were all grieving. I was a wreck. But Derek just…he left, and he stopped speaking to me. I don’t know why. It’s not…hostile or anything, we just don’t really talk. It is what it is.”

Kira looks at her, her gaze knowing. She can see right through Laura, can see just how much the situation actually gnaws at her, but she doesn’t comment on it, instead giving Laura’s hand a gentle squeeze, looking back down at the photograph.

“Well,” she says. “You’ve definitely got his eyebrows.”

Laughing, Laura gently bumps their shoulders together. “Hey, he has _my_ eyebrows, actually. I’m twelve minutes older than him.”

It’s funny, how even at thirty years of age, that indignation is still there.

***

Laura doesn’t usually visit home more than once a year, and when she does she usually only stays long enough to visit Peter’s grave with her family before leaving again.

Beacon Hills hasn’t changed much since Laura was in high school, though, and definitely not in the six months since her last visit. Kira seems to like it, however, taking in everything about the tiny town in the way that only someone used to a city like New York can. 

Laura’s mom takes to Kira immediately and she hovers back, this warm, _good_ kind of ache in her chest as she watches Kira’s nerves melt away as she laughs at one of her mom’s terrible jokes. She can see how happy her mom is and it kind of wants to make her cry. Too often she remembers how her mom looked after the fire. 

Even if they don’t talk, Laura can’t imagine how she’d survive if Derek died. Her mom and Uncle Peter weren’t just twins, they were best friends. She’s pretty sure that when he died, part of her mom’s heart died with him.

But now, her mom smiles, bright and warm and even if there’s a few more lines on her face and a little more grey in her hair, it reminds Laura of how she’d smile when they were kids. Derek always used to say that their mom’s smile was like a sunflower. Laura always used to call him a weirdo.

Kira’s nerves return when Cora and Malia get home, but just as Laura knew they would, they quickly like her. There’s something so beautiful, so _good_ about Kira that people can’t help but like her, can’t help but smile when she smiles and feel like the world is brighter when she laughs. Laura’s pretty certain Kira captured her heart in their first meeting and tells her as much as often as she can, just to see the grin on Kira’s face.

Unsurprisingly, Talia ropes Kira into helping to bake cookies, and Laura hovers back, watching them and enjoying the way the kitchen fills with the scent of ginger and cinnamon and the sound of their laughter. She doesn’t try to help; she has this amazing tendency to ruin everything she tries to bake. Cooking and baking was always Derek’s gig when they were kids, not hers.

Derek doesn’t arrive until evening. His fiancé, Stiles, is with him, and Laura hasn’t met him before. She checks up on Derek via facebook occasionally, though he doesn’t really know that she does. He’s a writer, living near the mountains with Stiles, and his facebook is filled with pictures of them hiking, or reading by the fire, or outside with their dog, or shots of Derek in cosy cardigans with glasses perched on his nose, smiling fondly at the person holding the camera. He’s _happy_ and seeing him so happy always brightens Laura’s day, even if she can never bring herself to send him a message or add him as a contact.

Dinner is quiet, awkward. Stiles is bright and talkative and kinda goofy, but it balances Derek out perfectly, and he and Kira click almost immediately. Laura and Derek trade the usual small talk before their mom swiftly moves conversation on, lightening the atmosphere by launching into a story that manages to embarrass both Laura _and_ Derek and make Kira and Stiles cackle.

After dinner, Laura’s the only one who sees Derek quietly slip away, tugging on his winter gear before stepping out of the front door. She tugs at the hem of her sweater, thinks of the ring in her bag, thinks of family, and heads to the front door, slipping on her own boots, jacket and gloves. Cora and Malia are clearing up the table but Kira approaches, offering a soft, encouraging smile as she wraps Laura’s scarf around her neck for her, then uses it to gently tug her down into a sweet kiss.

It’s bitterly cold outside. There’s no wind, but the bite in the air seems to seep through Laura’s jeans instantly, and she shivers, the porch floorboards creaking underfoot as she approaches the steps. Derek’s sat on the top step, gazing out at the frost touched trees surrounding the property. 

The house always seems strange now. The fire burned the east wing of the house before the fire fighters managed to put it out. They’d lost part of the kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom and a guest room.

They’d lost so much more than that.

Extensive work has been done and to anyone who didn’t know, the house looks like it’s always been the way it is. But they’d never restored the east wing, leaving a vacant space where it used to be. It fits. There’s a vacant space in all of their lives where Peter used to be. Now it’s just…empty.

Derek’s quiet as Laura sits next to him. His ears and nose are already red from the cold. When they were younger, Laura used to pull the twelve-minutes-older card to fuss over him, wrapping him up in a series of hideous scarves in the winter. There’s a collection of photos somewhere. She hasn’t seen them in years.

“Stiles is nice,” she offers. “He’s a good match for you.”

Derek’s mouth tips up slightly. “He’s a pain in the ass,” he says, with such utter devotedness in his voice.

“Exactly.”

He huffs a laugh at that, slanting a look her way. “Kira’s great. You’re really happy with her, aren’t you?”

Laura nods. “I really, really am.”

“I’m happy for you.”

The words are true and it warms Laura’s heart to hear them. “I’m happy for you too.” They sit there in silence for a few minutes, just listening to the stillness of the woods, before Laura says, quietly, “You never call, you never write.”

Derek doesn’t laugh. “You never call or write to me.”

“I would, if I didn’t think you’d shut me out even more if I did.”

He chews that over. Lifts his shoulder in a tiny shrug. “A few years ago I probably would have done. I wouldn’t now, though. You should visit. Stiles would love it.”

Laura wants to smile and say _yeah, sure, I’d love that_ or _I’ll bring Kira_ , but instead what comes out of her mouth is, “Why don’t we talk?” When Derek just looks at her, she adds, “You just…took off. You didn’t answer my calls or my emails. You just stopped talking to me.”

Derek’s brow furrows and he stares at her for a long minute. “You don’t remember what you said to me that night, do you?”

There are a lot of memories of that night that Laura wishes she never had to think about ever again, but now she curls her fingers tight around the step and tries to figure out what Derek’s talking about. She shakes her head.

Derek bows his head, looking down at his clasped hands. “You said it was my fault.”

And just like that, the memory snaps with harsh clarity into Laura’s mind. 

She’d been at a post graduation party that night. Derek had been invited, too – they were never Laura and Derek back then, they were _the twins_ : _the twins_ are coming bowling on Saturday, _the twins_ are invited to the party, _the twins_ are bringing booze – but he’d turned it down to ‘get an early night’. Laura had smirked, knowing he was going to sneak off to meet whichever secret girlfriend or boyfriend he’d been seeing for the past couple of months.

She’d been pretty drunk when the call came. Not on her cell phone, that was tucked in her jacket pocket which was…not on her and therefore not important. They’d had to call the hostess’ home phone. Her best friend Sadie had pushed her way through people, face pale, and Laura had known, even before she felt it a second later, tearing through her and ripping her apart from the inside out. Grief like nothing else she’d ever felt. Like losing a limb.

Someone in her pack had died.

Sadie had driven her and by the time they got there, the flames were almost out, but it was too late. She remembers how wrong the house looked, like some badly drawn charcoal sketch of itself, just empty beams and shattered windows and ruined walls. Her mom had been stood by one of the ambulances, Cora and Malia, both twelve, clinging to her. And Derek. Stood by himself, pale, shocked…guilty. She’d stumbled to him, needing her anchor, needing the reassurance of her twin while her whole world was turning upside down, and he’d reached out, fingers biting into her arms, and:

_“Kate,” he whispers. “She’s not…she did this…Kate did this.”_

The words, the cold, nauseating realization of what had happened, had broken something inside of Laura. She doesn’t remember much of what happened next. She remembers throwing herself at him, fists beating down on his chest, remembers shouting and crying. She remembers some of the words she’d screamed at him.

_“This is your fault, this is all your fault! What have you done? What have you DONE? I’ll never forgive you for this, never, I’ll never forgive -.”_

It had taken her mother flashing her alpha eyes and all of her strength to drag Laura back and away. Everything had stopped a second later, Laura’s word crashing to a halt, because it was then that they wheeled out a body in a bag.

Peter.

Laura feels sick. She digs her claws into her palms, guilt burning inside her ribcage. Derek still hasn’t looked up at her and she doesn’t blame him.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she manages, finally.

“I know. I know that now, but for a long time I blamed myself and I thought you blamed me too, so I…stayed away.”

Laura closes her eyes. Twelve years, and this is all her fault. “Derek, what happened…Kate was evil, okay? She was an evil bitch and she used you, manipulated you. What happened to you and what happened to…to Peter, you have _nothing_ to feel guilty about. It’s not your fault.”

Derek nods. “I know. I was…pretty screwed up for a while. It took me a long time to even _begin_ to process all of it, and even longer to try and confront my part in it and forgive myself. It took me a while to get to a point where I can say that it wasn’t my fault and believe it. Stiles helped a lot with that, actually. He…he was really good.”

Laura swallows. “Der…” she hasn’t used the nickname since they were eighteen and his gaze snaps to hers, shining with unshed tears. “I don’t blame you, either. Whatever stupid shit I said then, I was…I was an asshole and lashing out, but I never should have taken it out on you. I don’t blame you. I never have. And I’m…I’m really sorry.”

He closes his eyes, his whole body tipping towards hers. He leans his head on her shoulder. “I’ve wanted to hear you say that for so long,” he admits quietly. “That you don’t blame me.”

“I don’t blame you,” Laura repeats, lifting her arm to hug him tight. It’s like something slots back into place in her heart, like she can breathe properly for the first time in over a decade. “I’m a pretty shit sister, huh?”

“No.”

Laura sniffs slightly at that, squeezing him tighter. They sit there in silence for a long time. It’s cold and the tip of Laura’s nose has gone numb, but she’s not ready to go inside just yet.

“Can we talk?” she asks. “After this? I know we won’t go back to being best friends, but can we just…take baby steps? I miss you, Der. So much.”

“I miss you too, Laur,” he replies and the old nickname wrenches a tearful laugh out of her as he agrees, “Baby steps.”

**Author's Note:**

> written for the Laura Hale Appreciation Week on tumblr.
> 
> allirica.tumblr.com


End file.
